Think back to when you were calling PG&E to find out when your power might come back on: Did you stop to appreciate what it took for you to get that busy signal? Pacific Bell thought not, so they rushed out a press release to alert us that 44 of the company's call-processing offices in the North Bay, including 14 in Sonoma County, were forced to switch to emergency generators to keep those phones ringing. The phone company reported double the usual volume of calls on Dec. 12, the day after the worst of the storm, but could not verify how many of those were directed to their fellow utility.

Waiting to Inhale

After being thwarted twice by a governor's veto, a fledgling coalition of activists and others are working to place an initiative on the November ballot that would legalize the medical use of marijuana. But the efforts of Californians for Compassionate Use have been dealt a serious setback by the San Francisco Registrar of Voters, who ruled earlier this month that many of the petitions being circulated are not legally valid because the text of the attorney general's summary at the top of the page had not been printed in bold type. "For some reason, that's very important," muttered Gilbert Baker, a member of the campaign's steering committee, who acknowledged the bold-type requirement was specified by state law. "This is a big f--k-up." The flawed petition was produced by John Entwhistle, head of the campaign's San Francisco office, who "is under pressure to resign for his incompetence," said an unusually frank press release from CCU. The campaign has until April 18 to gather 600,000 valid voter signatures throughout the state, and is concentrating its efforts in Southern California. Marijuana has been shown to alleviate suffering in AIDS patients and persons with glaucoma, and bills supporting limited medicinal use of the drug have twice passed the California Legislature, only to be killed by the governor's pen.

Chat Chit

Having failed to win a network television audience with scripted shows, Caryl Kristensen and Marilyn Kentz will now try improvising in front of the cameras. The Petaluma-based comedy duo known as the Mommies will launch their new venture in April as a daytime talk show on ABC, two years after their NBC sitcom, cleverly titled "The Mommies," struggled through a year-and-a-half run. So that the new program will not be confused with the earlier bomb, ABC execs have proffered the distinctive title "The Mommies Talk Show."